U.S. and NATO commanders seek more troops in Afghanistan - Americas - International Herald Tribune

American and NATO military commanders in Afghanistan are worried about the resurgent Taliban insurgency and have asked for additional troops, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday, adding that he was sympathetic to the request.

Gates said that the commanders had "indicated what they could do with different force levels," but he would not say how many additional troops the commanders had requested. He spoke to reporters at the end of a two-day visit to Afghanistan, before flying here for meetings with Saudi officials.

Gates said General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would study the troop request with the chiefs of all the services and then make a recommendation.

The appeal for reinforcements was made a week after the Bush administration announced that it would send more than 21,000 additional troops to Iraq, where the United States already has about 132,000 soldiers.

Any significant increase in American force levels in Afghanistan could create severe manpower shortages in the U.S. Army, which is already under strain from five years of continuous deployments and is struggling to find additional troops for Iraq.

In his willingness to send more troops to both Afghanistan and Iraq, Gates is in stark contrast with his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who argued that withholding additional troops would encourage each country's own army to take the lead in military and security operations.

But Gates has quickly shifted the debate. During his visit to Kabul, he indicated that he favored aggressive action to root out the Taliban, which American officials have said in recent days is mounting increasingly brazen cross- border attacks from Pakistan and is preparing to intensify its attacks in the spring, especially in the south.

"There's no reason to sit back and let the Taliban regroup," Gates said. "I think it's very important that we not let this success in Afghanistan slip away from us."

a troop increase, arguing that it could help reduce the strain on ground forces.

"Clearly any kind of deployment of force is going to add to the short-term strain," he said. But it was possible that additional troops for Afghanistan would produce "a success, so you would have less stress on the force for a longer period of time," Pace said.

Gates said that military planners needed to examine "what role additional forces might play and where they would be assigned" in Afghanistan. Pentagon officials would have to look at whether more forces were available, he added.

Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the top American commander in Afghanistan, told reporters earlier this week that he wanted a 1,200-soldier battalion, now midway through a four- month deployment, to remain in Afghanistan beyond its planned departure date.

Officials would not say how many more American troops Eikenberry was seeking.

Gates met with General David Richards, the British officer commanding NATO forces in Afghanistan, who has complained repeatedly that unmet pledges of troops and equipment from NATO countries have left him 10 to 15 percent short of the forces he requires.

"Clearly, there is a need to fulfill those commitments, and I'll be asking them to do that" at a meeting of NATO defense ministers later this month in Spain, Richards said.

NATO's Afghanistan force is especially short of helicopters and airplanes for evacuating wounded troops and moving supplies. In addition, Richards said he still had not received 1,200 promised troops to serve as a reserve force that he could deploy around Afghanistan on short notice.

A Polish battalion that is expected to arrive in March was originally meant to be that reserve force, but officials said it would instead be sent to eastern Afghanistan.